2) Brochures, websites, menus etc for the hospitality industry. These
are an important interface with guests and you need to be sure there
are no mistakes, particularly in the age of tripadvisor, when guests
are actively looking for errors. Does anyone check your chef's menus?
Is it really a balantine of chicken? (I can assure you, it isn't.)

Website currently under construction: in the meantime, contact me to discuss your requirements.

Most
recent reviews are now being published on my blog site, but there is a
large stock of older reviews here, and longer, fuller articles will
also appear on this site.

Please bear in mind that many restaurants and chefs are liable to
change. I have moved a number of closed restaurants to a history
section, but times are tough for restaurants at the moment, so please
check with restaurants before making special journeys.

I
present brief portraits of particular wine estates, tasting
notes on wines, and other brief notes on wine
related matters. Be aware that some notes may
derive from a single taste of a wine: as with restaurants, so wines too change
all the time and one's experience can be affected by numerous
factors. Basically, as they say in internet circles, YMMV
(your mileage may vary).

This section of my
website centres around tasting notes, both from organised tastings and
wines tasted at home and in restaurants.
But there are also some longer pieces on individual producers or particular areas.

On
the evening of 31st December 1999, I held a small wine-tasting,
both as a bit of fun and in order to choose a couple of the wines to go
with the New Year's Eve Dinner. I am pleased to record that those wines
which were not already drunk up before midnight, all proved to be Y2K
compliant.
To keep things simple, we stuck to just one grape: the Riesling, and
the tasting went
something like this (follow the link for the gory details).
In case you were wondering, the overall "winner" was a 1983 Erdener
Treppchen Riesling Spätlese from Dr Loosen.

London restaurants of the past
I recently came across a web page, apparently written in the mid 1980s,
listing a selection of "upscale restaurants" in London. This
prompted some reminiscences from me. Click
here to read on.

Wine
links

There are thousands of
wine-related
sites on the internet, and I'm certainly not going to try to compete
here.

Here is a list of other sites
that I find myself looking at regularly:

The World of Fine Wine
magazine (a remarkable quarterly publication for which the term
magazine is a bit demeaning - highly recommended for serious
wine-lovers)

English Wine
Producers English wine
seems to get better every year, and vineyards are being planted/coming
into production across the country, even as far north as Lancashire and
Yorkshire. I like English wine,
I want to buy English wine,
I want to promote English wine - but, boy!, do the English vineyards
make it hard work! Welsh wines are also available, but I've not
discovered a generic website for them.

Epicurious.com
contains the recipe archives of the American magazines Gourmet and Bon
Appetit, though unfortunately the site is now filled with adverts.

This
link should take you to what is probably the most
sumptuous food magazine currently published, the Thuriès
magazine, a magazine which
aims itself "aux professionnels des
Métiers de Bouche et aux amateurs qui désirent
approfondir leurs connaissances en art culinaire et saisir toutes les
tendances de la gastronomie française." (You
can only really say that in French!)

If you find yourself
recognising rather a lot of the dishes people cook on Masterchef, then
the Thuriès magazine is for you!

If you're French isn't up to
it (it's remarkably easy actually) then Caterer &
Hotelkeeper (the trade magazine for the hospitality industry)
is actually one of the best ways to get recipes from the top chefs and
new ideas. This is the trade magazine, so there is a lot in it that
won't interest a general reader. But there is a recipe archive, which
you can access by following
this link. If you want to find out how little cooking goes on
in your local pub, café etc, pick up a copy of Caterer and
read the adverts for various food products: the mind boggles at just
what kitchens can buy pre-prepared or ready made.

If you need some cheese, I've
found this lot very efficient as well as selling cheese in tip-top
condition: The
Cheese Society But in the North of England, Carron
Lodge are great for the trade and for an excellent cheesemonger,
complete with live piano accompaniment, Churchmouse Cheeses in
Kirkby Lonsdale is hard to beat (well, unbeatable, as I know of no
other cheesemonger with a resident pianist!). In Cartmel,
Martin
Gott runs the excellent Cartmel Cheeses and in Clitheroe there is the
very naffly named, but excellent Cheesie Tchaikovsky. Both the latter
two have climate control to keep cheeses in tiptop condition, and does
away with much of the need for clingfilm. Also excellent is the rather wonderful Courtyard Dairy near Settle in Yorkshire.

Random Tasting notes on Cheese:for
miscellaneous (and now largely rather old) notes on cheeses tasted and
or eaten click
here

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